Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

One of the interesting things I’ve had to work on with the Advent of Code puzzles is loading files into SQL Server. Some of the inputs are large strings, but many are files with lines of code that need to be loaded into SQL Server.

I thought this might be a nice, simple SQLNewBlogger post. Do you know how to load a text file? Certainly the Import/Export wizard can work, but can you quickly load a file from T-SQL itself?

If you can’t, go work that out. If you get stuck, come back or search for help.

Loading a Text File

Obviously you need a place to load the file. I created a table for each puzzle, and here is the table for Day 2.

create table Day2_WrappingPresents( dimensions varchar(12))go

Now ordering doesn’t matter for this puzzle, so I have a very simple table. If ordering mattered, I’d have to do this differently.

To load this file, I’ll use the BULK INSERT command. This takes a table as a target, and optionally has a number of parameters. Since this is a simple load of a simple file with one column of data to a table with one column of data, I can use the defaults.

In this case, the insert will load all 1000 rows into the table. A simple query shows this works:

Now I can get on with the rest of my puzzle solution.

SQLNewBlogger

This is a great example of a simple thing that we might not need to do often, but we may need to do at times. Knowing how to do this, a simple operation, showcases that you are improving your SQL Server skills. This post took me about 5 minutes to write.